When I was a fellow at University of Chicago, just after the turn of the century, I did literature searches and then divided my PubMed bounty into articles I could download directly and those articles I would need to stalks the stacks to retrieve from hardcover bound versions of the journal. Any article in the latter group needed to be really important for it to be worth the extra-effort.
It was bits versus atoms. Bits were so much easier to gather, manage, and organize that it affected the information I would collect.
This artificial division largely fell away as more and more of the archives were moved to electronic format and the stuff that was trapped in atoms became less relevant as it faded further and further from the current time. Today, effectively all the medical literature exists as bits.
The new barrier is not between bits and atoms but between open access bits and paywalled bits.
See this exchange:
Hey @Nephro_Sparks, a baclofen toxicity article in Volume 1 Issue 1 of the Nepalese Medical Journal! And Open Access to boot https://t.co/kUxT7j54wT @nepmedjourn pic.twitter.com/4Mp2uKcp5J
— Joel M. Topf, MD FACP (@kidney_boy) June 26, 2018
No citation of https://t.co/VAz9syNVkz or https://t.co/p4kh91ZlQR
— Matthew Sparks, MD (@Nephro_Sparks) June 26, 2018
https://twitter.com/akshayakeerti/status/1011754523663261698?s=21
We may be moving to a world where if you want to be read (and to be cited) you will need to publish in open access journals.